Child Item

Site Totals

61445 Questions Answered 270 Categories

How Reliable is Verizon 3G

As a recent convert from land lines to all wireless, and most of the time the Verizon 3G I have here is outstanding (faster than my former DSL)!! But when it's bad, it's REALLY bad! I have excellent reception on my MIFI (the tower is within sight of my house) and my computer. When the 3G is bad, I have hours (12-24 hours at a time) where Verizon 3G service drops to BELOW 1kB/sec. I can't get any work done at that rate! Is it local? (I am on Hawai'i Island - the Big Island). This has been happening about 2-4x per month without any "sevrice interruption" announcements. Anyone experiencing similar problems with Verizon???

Comments

budone

Being on an island, I would expect there would be SOME glitches. Normally when you see issues like that, they tend to be maintenance or upgrade related.

care to add anything

Tidbits

I am on Oahu so I can't speak much for the Big Island. I would assume it may be due to the Volcano still being active which does cause interference to mobile connection.

Which side of the island are you on?

coffeebob

Thanks for the suggestion. I am in South Kona so although we get some of the vog, it is not usually severe. Also, the cell tower is between 1-2 mi from my house, line of sight, so interference from ionized atmospheric particles is not likely. I'm beginning to think that Verizon may do maintenance and not tell anyone ... that's a bummer when one has a deadline to meet. I've asked Verizon, but have gotten nothing but form letter responses. Sigh!

coffeebob

Thanks, I had hoped that Verizon would let folks know when they are performing maintenance. At least the phone co. would let you know when DSL would be impaired or down.

yaro1776

I live in the hills of Vermont and have had a 3G broadband plan for about 6 months with the 5GB usage plan. I use a cell signal booster that consistently provides a solid two to three bars according to VZaccess Manager. The overall broadband service is sporadic in terms of speed and up time. For example there are frequent periods where the service just disappears (my cell phone will still show 3 to 4 bars while this is happening).

However this issue is minor in comparison to the obvious speed throttling that takes place over the course of the day. It is almost like clockwork - speeds prior to 6 AM or so are up to ~0.5 Mbps and somewhere between 6 and 7 AM start deteriorating down to my dialup modem speed of 50kbps or slower. Of course there are days when the speeds may be higher - up to 150-200kbps. By Golly there are even a couple of daytime periods of max speed (0.5mbps) per month.

After 7 or 8 PM the speeds slowly start climbing again so that by about 11 or 12 PM they may reach the 0.5mbps threshold.

FYI my monthly usage is around 1GB, with one month at a whopping 2GB. There is no way that I have the time to wait for my usage to ever reach 5GB for a month. Looking at biting the bullet and cancelling this plan - does not live up to the hype in terms of speed, quality of service and consistency.

Child Item